Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States

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Winner, George Perkins Marsh Award for Best Book in Environmental History, American Society for Environmental History, 2007

Bananas, the most continuously consumed fresh fruit in the USA, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, “banana republics,” and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the upward push in banana consumption in the USA have an effect on the banana-growing regions of Central The us? In this vigorous, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the USA.

Beginning in the 1870s when bananas first seemed in the U.S. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures liable to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers’ lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the USA. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds the most important chapter to the history of Honduras, in addition to to the larger history of globalization and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.

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